


the sleep of blessed things

by gogollescent



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-22
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-30 03:11:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1013391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hanji calls on Annie after the events of Chapter 50.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sleep of blessed things

**Author's Note:**

> haha this is going to be jossed so fast

You spend a week in Trost, lying flat on your back under the intact section of the hospital's roof; they've covered the northern wing with a tarp, but for you, a soldier in His Majesty's army—even that army's least regarded and most expensive branch—only a room with a ceiling will do. Pity. You think the tarp would give you an interesting perspective on the plight of your foes. That Titan in the wall, feeling daylight for the first time in 107 years—was that pleasant, the tide of warmth on his flayed, glossy cheek? Somehow you doubt it. After long deprivation, relief is one more torment: look at how eating bread breaks starving mouths. Look at Eren, humanity's new hope. So it's no wonder that the Titan stayed put, his eyes following Mikasa in lazy rings, until a tarp unrolled to cover him. But you are resolved not to double his error, and sink back down behind a makeshift pall.

As always, your worst enemy is the pace of regeneration. Your body's sloth, in this case; not an opponent's swiftness. Second-degree burns all down your flank. Except you could proceed at any pace you liked, flirting with nurses and eating the unwanted pineapples from your neighbors' fruit baskets, if the world were less bent on convalescence. Not only the Titans, but your rulers, your species, and the walls: all refuse to allow their wounds a minute in the sun. Put one hole through the barriers to your seeing, and it will mend without the merest scar.

That's fine by you. You would, if necessary, dice them to ribbons. You are only afraid that a thousand cuts will prove likewise insufficient. Which is why, halfway through your prescribed leave, you discharge yourself from the hospital and take an overnight carriage to Stohess, and at five in the morning descend the stairs to Leonhardt's dungeon.

The guards are scouts, which must rile Dawk to all hell. They let you by without a fuss.

Armin is sitting quietly on the ground in front of the crystal, his eyes open. He may nonetheless be dreaming; he doesn't react to your footsteps, and his head is bowed almost to rest against his clavicle, long hair shielding the sides of his face. The resemblance, between him and what you can see of Leonhardt in the crystal, is undeniable though limited: a matter of complexion and stature, and at this moment indifference. He would look more like her if he had not some point exchanged his greens for civilian garb.

It's funny. He knew her as a person first, a Titan second, and recognized the friend in the giant's incomprehensible flesh. But to you, this locked-away child can only register as a hard distillation: of her vaster, hollower self.

You look closer. Her uniform is blood-free and otherwise immaculate, although you believe there were still a few stains from her earlier shell when the crystal formed around her. It must have evaporated in what little space there was between body and rough gem, or perhaps been incorporated into the prison's material. You wish you could believe the crystal's integrity had been damaged by that pulse of sanguine heat.

“Squad Leader!” says Armin, behind you. You hear him scramble to his feet, and stumble, a distinct pattern of sound; you are prepared to smile reassuringly at him, but when you turn his attention has already shifted back to the girl.

“Are you going to try to open...?”

You can see so much of her, like this, albeit in scattered parts. The facets brimming with dark tints taken from cloth and skin. Her face doubled and lent dimensions it has no claim to, like the face of some desperate soldier after shooting herself in the head. The closed eyes there, the brains spread out, the mouth so far below. Your own hand pierces the depths with short brown arrows, when you hold it up to one edge.

“I have some ideas,” you say. “But no. Not tonight.” (Outside, the sun will be rising, inside a net of rain.) “Armin, have you been talking to her? Do you think she hears you?”

“No,” says the boy who gave her to you. “I haven't told her anything.”

 

This is later. You reported to Erwin, apologized for evacuating your sickbed prematurely, pointed out that he's been doing one-armed paperwork since three days after his return to human territory, were informed that his injuries aren't liable to reopen if he goes for walks or wear clothes, asked whether he would prefer you to go for walks without clothes, and were sent back to study Leonhardt. It shouldn't be a priority, with what the Survey Corps discovered by its most recent outing: but Eren Jaeger, on the insistence of both the military police and his friends, is undergoing a longer period of enforced R&R than you did. The world beyond him has slowed to unreal stillness. A larger crystal: all politics and fear no more than the faint reflection of an upraised hand. Later—but you might as well have remained underground throughout, for all the torchlit chamber alters or the warm gutted darkness lifts.

In a way, you find it soothing, as impatient as you are to begin exploring Eren's new capacities. There's a familiar futility in testing diamonds, hammers, torches on Leonhardt's cage; a fruitlessness that spurs you on and whets your appetite. It's not that you think there's no point to your work, any more than you thought there was no point to destroying, again and again, Sawney's wide eyes: but even if it finally yields nothing, you will have the satisfaction of knowing how much there was to be done.

More than you've tried, to be sure. The surest way would be to take her topside; to give her at least the hope of escape. If it went wrong, it would mean, at minimum, another few hundred or thousand lives, and you have not yet thought of a way it could go right. Still it pulls at you, the thought of dragging her up again, maybe balancing the thing on a trapdoor—well. You have never learned anything except by putting yourself at the enemy's mercy, as poor Moblit could testify. You filled the hole in Sina with drywall, but if you could have done so without risking humanity, if you were the last person in the world, you would have lowered yourself in on a rope. You would have hung there, in that artificial night, and glimpsed what manner of stars. Eyes opening, down the row, and shifting, massive shoulders: the cool blue gleam of veins on ruddy meat.

At night, you try verbal petitions. “Annie, we won't hurt you,” you say with your arm against the crystal, your head on your arm, your breath fogging the invisible surface. “We would have tried, I admit, but you must see you have leverage now—if we mistreat you, you can always go back into your rock, hey?” You knock gently on a vertex. “We—excuse me, let's be honest here: _I—_ just want to chat. See if we don't have any common ground. I know it seems unlikely.” Abstraction makes you fiddle with your bandages, and you do so now, adjusting the clean cloth at your neck. “Hah, I must seem pretty breakable to you. In there. I don't even have, what do you call it, armor, like your friend. By the way, you do know we have your friends?”

(If only. The dark, retreating shape of Reiner Braun's bent-kneed Titan, quickly lost behind a screen of pines—you weren't there, but one of the 104th recruits, Connie, will describe it with harrowing bitterness to anyone who asks, if they buy him a drink. Which these days, almost no one won't.)

“Yes, and I'm afraid they're a little less adept than you at silence... spoiled, maybe, by their natural advantages? That Colossal Titan—very impressive, his steam jets.” Less absently, you gesture to your burns where they peek out from their white wrappings. You step back as though she can take in the view. “But so, perhaps, they never had cause to develop other forms of self-protection. In their human bodies, at least. Not like you, Annie. You're really something. That localized hardening, what do you even call that? I didn't get a chance to watch it up close, but from what I saw, it didn't seem analogous to any process found in animals. Not like healing, or regeneration... not exactly a scab, either. The closest thing I can think of is how corpses fossilize when they're buried in certain kinds of mud. Animal corpses, that is.” The soft tissues replaced by minerals, but retaining the organic architecture, the particulars of bone. It would almost make sense, if she hadn't done it living, and afterwards kept mobility and unimpaired control. And if the material hadn't resembled diamond more than peat.

“Where do you get it?” you ask her, thinking of the column of light that accompanied her manifesting body, how flesh curled out of the air like a blossom, or an explosion, or simply a meteorological accident. But all those things had sources, whether in the earth or the far-off ocean, while the Titan shifters formed themselves at no apparent cost. Like thought, flowing unreasonably from the dull, germless stuff of the brain; the world itself gave rise to them, although it had no right to. You have already forgotten that you meant to goad her with mentions of her cohorts on the rack. “All that mass... you guys aren't very dense, sure, but you're not nothing. It's weird enough that you can make new cells without eating, but crystal? Stone? Maybe I could believe, in Stohess, that you were somehow drawing on the environs—I'm sure no one was keeping track of their jewelry—but in the forest?”

Silence, of course. For a moment, caught up in your theories, you'd expected not an answer but a weary interruption, the kind Levi or Mike would have provided. Annie sitting across from you or beside you at a low wooden table, such as they had at HQ, propping her chin on her hand, chewing her nails—you couldn't see any evidence that she did, but she seemed the type. In your ghostly vision. Annie saying, Hanji, I'm tired. Let me go. As though she and not you were the one waiting for a crack, or bare acknowledgment.

 

You start again.

“I've been talking to Eren about his experience as a Titan,” you tell her, truthfully. “I'm particularly interested in what happened at Trost, when he was first coming to grips with his power.” One of his powers. You've decided against mentioning the other, as unlikely as it is that she's hearing any of this. Not that she could have tried any harder to kidnap Eren than she did, you suppose—but even as you think it, you know that's inaccurate. Something went wrong for Annie at Stohess, and it wasn't only Armin Arlert. So. Best not to reaffirm her target's significance.

“You know, I think, that the operation to plug the breach went wrong initially. He attacked Mikasa.” A glance, here, at the girl's small, intact fingers, curved slightly against her plump thighs. No line to mark where their cannon-sized counterparts broke, unless you count the ring. “And knocked himself out, which we've never managed to do to a regular Titan... I always figured that their brains were in their stomachs anyway, hah? Or their necks. Nothing you could put out of commission by hitting your head! Hey, did he ever do that for you? I know you sparred together. You ever have to drag him back to the barracks, because he punched his own damn lights out? Imagine how much time you could have saved, if only you'd known. You could have snatched him there and then.

“I'm glad you didn't. I like Eren. And it's selfish to say, but to be here, at the cusp of humanity's comeback, means a great deal to me. Maybe you would have left us alone, if you'd had Eren—but would that have been enough, really? To be left alone, protected, like you in here? Oh, but I'm getting distracted.” You tap your forehead.

“Trost. So, blunt trauma—slow-healing stuff at that. Well, if you ask Eren, he'll say he doesn't remember the punch, or Mikasa shouting at his nose. He says he had a dream.”

One of the torches is burning low. Outside it must be midnight, or a little later; soon the guards will change shifts, and the current ranks will go to their well-deserved rest. The rain that began on the night you came back to Stohess has yet to let up, though you can't detect any sign of it down here, through earth and stone. Instead you imagine it falling on your fellow soldiers: on whatever roof Levi is sleeping under, with Pastor Nick instead of you to entertain him, and on the shingled gable above Erwin's Sina office, the room where he will no doubt still be up writing proposals—acts of demeaning transparency—to the king and Pixis and Zacklay. On Mike's body, wherever it is. On the bodies the Survey Corps abandoned when fleeing the Female Titan, strewn at intervals across the once-cultivated miles of land between the ancient forest and Wall Rose: a bleak parody of the supply deposits you'd laid down between Shiganshina and Trost. They will still be there now, rotting in their shrouds, the damp and scavengers destroying them as quickly as Titans heal. If crows have pulled back their covers, then the rain will pool in their eaten eyes, clear as hard gemstone.

This is what you all do, as impermanent phenomena on Earth. Even decay you can mistake for a course of preservation.

“He was dreaming about his family. The day Maria fell. Armin had to stab him in the arm to snap him out of it. He probably wishes he could do the same thing to a rock!” You laugh, but it's true: Armin comes in here almost as often as you do, keeping out of the way of Moblit and your team. His blue eyes like two swords. An infinitely replaceable edge, has Armin—cruelty of a kind that snaps easily, and often, but which as a consequence never loses its keenness, because by the time sentiment mars the grain of the steel he is already attaching a fresh blade. You're fond of him, but you wish there were any quick and easy means to douse his just-forged hero worship. Where it concerns you and your superiors, anyway. You're not interested in a protege, if you could have a collaborator, and the plain truth is that Erwin and Zacklay and the rest are too enamored of expendable resources as it is. You, too, have known the thrill of finding your quiver bottomless, of never losing the ability to sacrifice more, to forget more, to throw yourself—heart, body, and the mind that seems so nearly infinite—at your adversary; you have waived all rights for a chance to wound. It isn't enough. Not that you think he would hurt Leonhardt, if he saw another way... but thinking only of knives could blinker anybody. And there may not be another way.

And then what? Say you do get her out, and she's silent. Does it have to be him? The truth is, if it weren't for the possibility that he'll come up with something to free her, you would already have banned him from her cell. He might think of it as accountability, as showing his respect; but having tried for years to empathize with Titans, mourn them, and confirm that they feel pain, you find that there is nothing respectful about torturing that which you understand—nothing humane about the insight Armin has on Leonhardt's mind. Humanity is building walls: not breaking them open.

Nevertheless.

“What's strange, Annie...”

You discover that you are exhausted. Like Armin on that first evening, you sit down at the foot of the crystal, pressing your forehead directly against the base.

“Well, afterwards, when he picked up the boulder... it's not that the dream stopped. Only then his house was burning, and his family dead, and dream-him was giving some kind of inspiring monologue. I paraphrase. The next thing he knew, he was being dragged out of the neck.”

(Levi, come to salvage what remained. You wish he were here. You'd fuck him in a fancy Sina inn, or take him out to some little hole in the wall restaurant from his misspent youth, as long as it wasn't literally, at this point, a hole in the wall. All right, you wouldn't do any of that; you'd have him down here, staring at the girl who killed his squad and put him out of action. But it's nice to pretend.)

“He hasn't confirmed this, and in point of fact I suspect his memories of the relevant occasions are too patchy for him to do so... but I think it's like that for him much of the time, as a Titan. Whether or not he manages to accomplish the task he was set. Did you know, he almost took Braun down, using the fighting techniques you taught him? And in his head, he was seeing you. You and Mikasa. A memory, from when you two had some kind of bust-up. I haven't been able to find out how that ended. But it must have been one hell of a fight.”

The torch you noticed earlier is a honeycomb of embers. “Well, so I was thinking,” you say dreamily, breathing out half-moons of condensation against the crystal— “what do a human and a Titan have in common? Where would their nervous systems overlap, and where would they differ? For example, Eren's motor skills are presumably all redirected to the Titan's limbs... and as for cardiac and respiratory functions, I'm not sure he even needs oxygen. Nor do you, it seems like. Kids these days! Really, the only ambiguity is how sensory input enters in, and what his cortex does with it after. Reminisce, maybe? Everything else translates without a hitch.

"And yet he's very human, you know. Eren. Plus, of course, you impressed all of us with your intelligence outside Rose. Your foresight. As humans, then—are we just dreaming killers? No different from those lurching, smiling, devouring brutes, organisms who can't even respond to their own suffering... Except for our irrelevant memories.

"When you dream, Annie. Do you see us coming for you?”

You stop.

Your throat hurts. It occurs to you that you have now spent plural hours conversing with a rock. Not even Armin is here at this hour, or Eren, or Mikasa with her prowling unease. Eren, actually, hasn't been down at all, though probably not of his volition. It's a little sad, and yet less than she deserves: that she should have ended up in this way, with just an old scientist for company. Someone who can only extend her the same courtesy and interest they have already shown a hundred lesser monsters—things with no pilots, no pasts, and no former friends, asleep in the world above them.


End file.
